Khaan again. Yes, 3.4 million points for this alone. I guess it will by about 2.5 million points once I have cropped things down to the fossil. And that is MEDIUM density 🙂
What this model shows clearly is that a tripod, high Fs and looooong exposures really help the quality of the resulting alignment and point cloud. My tripod cost ~ $300, and is worth every cent!
Yesterday, I took 947 photos of 32 Citipati tail vertebrae. To my utter horror they mostly failed to align, and left huge gaps in the models. Thus, rinse and repeat – but this time with tripod and with a page from a paper under the verts. This allows a tremendous number of alignment points to be found.
Check what the Khaan skull photos gave:
All blue points were used for the alignment! That’s how you want it: many points, and evenly spread over the entire image. Below, check out how many points for the vert photos are on the print, not the fossil. That is an important difference to a blank, point-free background. Although the image overall was much less suited to good alignment than the Khaan one above, the points on the text made the difference 🙂
dinosaurpalaeo 
It’s amazing what those tail bones look like at such an angle. Only in Nomingia have they been illustrated in any thing close to good multi-plane views, but the availability of Khaan hasn’t made intensive description yet. Possible, but just not done; and not available. Sadness. I would LOVE to see your work on this, Heinrich, whenever you get around it it.
Jaime, thank Michael Pittman for the project idea 🙂 We’ll figure and describe as much as we can!
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